PLENARY SPEAKERS
Ángel Felices Lago (Universidad de Granada, Spain)
Lecture: Methodological underpinnings for the construction of a criminal law subontology in FunGramKB
Dr. Ángel Felices Lago began his university career at the University of Granada in 1984 and is currently Full Professor at the Department of English and German Philology. He teaches English and Spanish for specific purposes for undergraduate and postgraduate students at the Faculty of Business Studies and the Center for Modern Languages. He was Associate Dean for International Relations (1993-2001) and head of the Center for Modern Languages at the University of Granada (2001-2008). His main areas of research interest go from lexicology, discourse analysis and axiological linguistics to LSP teaching and knowledge engineering. He has co-authored or co-edited various scholar and pedagogical books and has also published over 80 scholarly articles and reviews in specialized national and international journals and volumes. He has served as invited reviewer or member on the editorial and scientific boards of a number of journals such as Mediterranean Studies, Ibérica, Materiales para la enseñanza multicultural, Ideas, Cizí Jazyky, Cuadernos AISPI, Review of Cognitive Linguistics, Onomázein, or Odisea. He has also led or taken part in various international academic projects funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education and the European Union (Tempus, Leonardo, Erasmus, Erasmus-Mundus), and is currently leading a R&D project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness to create a terminological ontology based on deep semantics, with the cooperation of 7 universities and international legal institutions. Finally, he has given lectures, special courses or conducted seminars in institutions from all over the world (Bratislava, Katowice, Madrid, Moknine, Moscow, Nijmegen, Prague, Salt Lake City, Santander (Menéndez Pelayo U.), Sao Paulo, Swansea, Trieste or Vienna, among others).
Lachlan Mackenzie (VU University Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Lecture: Constructions and the lexicon in Functional Discourse Grammar
Born in Scotland in 1950, Dr. J. Lachlan Mackenzie graduated in French and German Language and Literature and then went on to complete a PhD in General Linguistics in 1978 at Edinburgh. From 1977 to 1987 he was a Lecturer at VU University Amsterdam, where he later became a Full Professor in English Language and the Faculty's Director of Research; since 2007 he has been a a part-time Professor of Functional Linguistics there. He is also a researcher at CELGA-ILTEC, a linguistics institute in Lisbon and Coimbra, Portugal. He is Research Manager of SCIMITAR, an international network for linguistics and discourse analysis based in Santiago de Compostela. In the first fifteen years of his presence in Amsterdam, he worked closely with Simon C. Dik on Functional Grammar. In more recent years he has collaborated with Kees Hengeveld on the elaboration of Functional Discourse Grammar, publishing Functional Discourse Grammar (OUP) and various articles with him; in addition, he has been active as an editor of the international journal of functional linguistics, Functions of Language. He has applied his linguistic knowledge in textbooks for students on practical grammar and academic writing, including Compare and Contrast, a grammar of English for Spanish speakers co-written with Elena Martínez Caro. His most recent book is Casebook in Functional Discourse Grammar (John Benjamins), co-edited with Hella Olbertz. See www.lachlanmackenzie.info
Ruslan Mitkov (University of Wolverhampton, United Kingdom)
Lecture: Meaning and knowledge representation in anaphora resolution
Dr. Ruslan Mitkov’s extensively cited research includes 200 publications on various topics of Natural Language Processing (NLP). His research output was highlighted as internationally leading in the last UK Research Assessment Exercise. Prof. Mitkov is best known for his seminal contributions to anaphora resolution and automatic generation of multiple-choice tests but his research has been influential in other areas too including centering, translation memory, evaluation, term extraction, cognates and false friends, and translation universals. Prof. Mitkov is author of the authoritative monograph Anaphora resolution (Longman) and sole Editor of one of the most successful handbooks published by Oxford University Press: The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics. Current prestigious projects include his role as Executive Editor of the Journal of Natural Language Engineering (Cambridge University Press) and Editor-in-Chief of the NLP book series of John Benjamins publishers. Prof. Mitkov has been invited as a keynote speaker at a number of international conferences and has acted as Programme Chair of major conferences on NLP, Machine Translation, Translation Technology and Anaphora Resolution. He is regularly asked to review for prominent international funding bodies and organisations, for leading journals, publishers and conferences, to serve as a member of Programme Committees or Editorial Boards and to act as a referee for applications for Professorships in North America and Europe. Dr. Mitkov has considerable external funding to his credit and is currently managing several large projects, funded by UK research councils, by the EC as well as by companies and users from the UK and USA. Ruslan Mitkov received his university degree from the Humboldt University in Berlin, his PhD from the Technical University in Dresden and has worked as a Research Professor at the Institute of Mathematics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia. Mitkov is Professor of Computational Linguistics and Language Engineering, and Director of the Research Institute in Information and Language Processing at the University of Wolverhampton which he joined in 1995 and where he established the highly successful Research Group in Computational Linguistics. In recognition of his outstanding professional/research achievements, Prof. Mitkov was awarded the title of Doctor Honoris Causa at Plovdiv University in 2011.
Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez (Universidad de La Rioja, Spain)
Lecture: Cognitive modeling, motivation and explanation across descriptive levels in the Lexical Constructional Model
Dr. Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez is full professor on Linguistics at the University of La Rioja. He works in cognitive linguistics, inferential pragmatics, and functional grammar. He has published several books and well over 100 articles and book chapters. He has been invited -on more than fifty occasions- to present his research in universities and other research institutions in Madrid, Pisa, Galati, Timisoara, Hamburg, Copenhagen, Lodz, Las Palmas, Provo, Beijing, Lima, Bogotá, among other places. He has also been an invited speaker in national and international conferences, among them the International Conference on Cognitive Linguistics (Pavia, 2003), International Contrastive Linguistics Conference (Santiago, 2005) and the 10th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference (Krakow, 2007), III Conference on Metaphor in Language and Thought (Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil, 2008), Languages and International Business: First Forum across Disciplines (Beijing, 2010), Cognitive Perspectives on Contrastive Grammar (Bielsko-Biala, Poland, 2011), First International Conference on Meaning and Knowledge Representation (Madrid, 2012). He serves on the editorial and scientific boards of a number of journals such as Miscelánea, Estudios de Filología Moderna, Jezikoslovlje, Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense, Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada, ITL-International Journal of Applied Linguistics, International Journal of Cognitive Linguistics, Revue Romane, and Cognitive Linguistics. He was the editor of the Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada from 1998 to 2005 and is currently the editor of the Review of Cognitive Linguistics, and co-editor of the series Applications of Cognitive Linguistics (Mouton de Gruyter). Since January 2012 he is co-editor of the Bibliography of Metaphor and Metonymy (Metbib), published by John Benjamins. He was president of the Spanish Association of Applied Linguistics from 2005 to 2011. He has been the head organizer of two major international conferences, the 8th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference (University of La Rioja, 2003) and the 44th International Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (University of La Rioja, 2011). He has also organized a number of other smaller conferences, such as the two Conferences of the Research Center on the Applications of Language, CRAL 2009, 2013, and several workshops and seminars.
ROUND-TABLE DISCUSSION: What can theoretical linguistics do for NLP research?
(hosted by Gianluca Pontrandolfo, University of Trieste)
Elke Diedrichsen (Institute of Technology Blanchardstown, Ireland)
Dr. Elke Diedrichsen is a German linguist based in Dublin. She has worked as a researcher and deputy professor in several universities across Germany. Until recently, she worked as a Project manager in an international team of linguists for development and quality assurance with Google speech products (NLP, ASR, TTS) in Google’s European Headquarters in Dublin, Ireland. She is a Member of the Computational and Functional Linguistics Research Group at the Institute of Technology Blanchardstown (ITB), Dublin. Elke Diedrichsen has widely published about functional linguistics, Role and Reference Grammar, constructions as grammatical objects, NLP, pragmatics and the semiotic, cultural and interactional potential of memes. Her recent publications include a volume co-edited with Brian Nolan (2013), entitled Linking constructions into functional linguistics ¬– The role of constructions in grammars. She is also the author of the paper “A Role and Reference Grammar parser for German” which appeared in Language processing and grammars: The role of functionally oriented computational models, edited by Brian Nolan and Carlos Periñán-Pascual (2014). The software is able to classify German sentences and parse them into eight German sentence constructions. It achieves a lexical feature classification and displays the lexical features of the components (number, gender, case etc., also: human vs. inanimate). Elke Diedrichsen is currently co-editing a volume on argument structure in functional grammar with Brian Nolan and Gudrun Rawoens on Causation, Permission and transfer – Argument realisation in GET, GIVE, PUT and TAKE verbs to appear with Benjamins.
Brian Nolan (Institute of Technology Blanchardstown, Ireland)
Dr. Brian Nolan is Head of School of Informatics and Engineering at the Institute of Technology Blanchardstown, Dublin in Ireland. The research interests of Dr. Nolan include computational approaches to language processing, linguistic theory at the morphosyntactic-semantic interface, argument structure, valence, event structure, and the architecture of the lexicon. His linguistic work has been in the functional linguistic model of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) and he has published extensively internationally. Recent work includes the development of a rule–based Arabic to English machine translation engine with the RRG linguistic model supporting an interlingua bridge and the investigation of linguistic models to underpin Irish Sign Language avatars. Dr. Brian Nolan is the author of a book, published in 2012 by Equinox UK, on the linguistic structure of Irish in an RRG account entitled: ‘The structure of Irish: A functional account’. He co-edited two books of collected papers from international authors on ‘Linking Constructions into functional linguistics – The role of constructions in RRG grammar’ and ‘Language processing and grammars: The role of functionally oriented computational models’, published within the John Benjamins ‘Studies in Language’ Series. Dr. Nolan has 40 years experience nationally and internationally within the computer industry in a variety of senior roles and is also a widely published professional linguist.
Carlos Periñán-Pascual (Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain)
Dr. Carlos Periñán-Pascual studied English Language and Literature at Universidad de Valencia (Spain) and received his Ph.D. degree in English Philology at UNED (Spain) in 1999. Since his doctoral dissertation on the resolution of word sense disambiguation in machine translation, his main research interests have been focused on knowledge engineering, natural language understanding and computational linguistics. As a result, he has been the director and founder of the FunGramKB project since 2004, whose main goal is to develop a lexico-conceptual knowledge base to be implemented in NLP systems requiring language comprehension. After having designed the knowledge base, he is now developing some tools for the FunGramKB Suite, such as the terminology extractor, the conceptual logical structure builder, and the inference engine. His scientific production includes about 50 peer-reviewed publications in the fields of linguistics, natural language processing and artificial intelligence. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Applied Linguistics Department at Universidad Politécnica de Valencia (Spain).
Francisco M. Rangel Pardo (Autoritas Consulting S.A., Spain)
Francisco Rangel is CTO at Autoritas Consulting and main scientist of the Social Business Intelligence tool Cosmos. Cosmos allows organizations to include social knowledge into their intelligence cycle by retrieving and processing millions of social media conversations in real time. Coordinator of Active Listening and Analysis areas at Socialancer, one of the main blogs about social media in Spain and Latin America. MAVIR 2007 Award for the best research work in Natural Language Processing & Information Retrieval. Dell 2009 Award Finalist in Technological Excellence (Fivasa Group/ SIC+). Mobip 2010 Award to the Most Innovative Idea (Corex SIC+). Co-organiser of the PAN task on Author Profiling in 2013 & 2014 at CLEF, whose aim has been identifying age and gender of authors of anonymous social media texts. On May, 17th Francisco Rangel has been interview at the "Informe Semanal" of TVE-1 where he described Autoritas's natural language processing activities on social media texts.